aquila mini shot shell

I'm still holding out for supply to catch up with demand. In my opinion, $0.75 per round is too much to pay. My feeling is that the price should settle in around $0.45 per round, (something like $9 - $10 for a box of 20 would be reasonable).

Well, the mini shell slugs I ordered from Midway USA arrived today. Er, well, half of them anyway. Grrr. I ordered two boxes, was charged for two boxes, but there was only one box in the package. And it was busted open, 20 shells rolling around loose. Man they could do a better job of packing for what they charge for S&H. Sent them an email. We'll see what happens.

Just checked. Now they are out of stock, so it looks like they will need to refund me for a box.

I agree, but Aquila knows that the demand is out there and they can overcharge for the minis.
Kind of a captive audiience.

I got my 2 boxes of mini-slugs in from Midway, packed in a box that could have held 8 boxes of 3" magnums. There was one Aquila box that remained intact, but the other one had decided to release its 20-shells into the packing box.
I'm going to cut one open and post some pictures in a "Reloading" thread as I'm thinking that there has to be some way to "Roll Your Own".
(I was going to do that earlier but I slept all day).

Midway is going to refund me for the one box that didn't arrive. They said the reported package weight was correct for 2 boxes shipped tho. I have to keep all the packaging until UPS completes their investigation for tampering. The package did not look tampered with to me.

I stopped being a midway customer a while back. Finally had to resort to disputing the charges for the package because they wouldn't replace the order or give a refund either one. This went on for weeks. What makes it worse is it was just a stupid $9 flash hider. Even escalated with a supervisor trying to get it resolved to no avail.

Once upon a time, I had a dealer account with midway. To say that I spent many thousands of dollars with them would be an understatement when I had my FFL's.

Midway has always been my last resort for items I can't find anywhere else and want to pay top dollar for. Apparently they aren't going to refund any of the shipping cost, so that means I'm paying over $12 shipping for $19 in merchandise.

I found a 1 box of birdshot at Dong`s in Tulsa last Sunday for $14.99 so I went ahead bought `em just see how they will cycle through my pump gun.....from what I`ve read they seem to like the Winchester 1300.

Checked out the Almmofast site, DP3, and it's another site that I've bookmarked. It does look like it has fast shipping, relatively cheap shipping ($9.99 up to $25 pounds).
They do have SOME minishells, but like everywhere, they come in and they go out fast.
Another source for spending my money, not that I need that. View attachment 15751

Click to expand...

Thanks Mr. Sluggo!
Ordered on Monday and got them today (4 days), they were packed great and arrived in that condition too. Including the $9.99 for shipping my ciphering comes to about $1.34 per shell...proofs in the puddin` I rekon.

You can craft those mini shells pretty easily out of target shells. It's not difficult. Common substitution loading. John A. can tell you all about that. No reason for me to type it all out. You can make a quickie and pretty much free adapter for those mini shells from a strip of steel banding strap. Cut it narrow enough to fit the groove on the bottom of the bolt carrier and solder it to the lifter tabby thingie. File it all smooth and then shrink wrap a piece of wire shrink wrap over it and the tab.

Thanks for that suggestion, Richard. It does sound like that is more of a permanent adapter arrangement than I had in mind but I DO appreciate that input.

I do have the rubber adapter for the Mossberg 500 and we tried it out at the range yesterday. We fit 8 in the tube, cycled one into the chamber, and re-added the 8th for a total of 9.
We regular cycled, slow cycled, fast cycled, cycle at odd gun angles and the mini-s fed every time and extracted fully every time.
Recoil, as expected, was minimal. Accuracy at 50 yards was good (t/- 5 inches) considering we were free standing and had to make a few tweaks along the way.
Power at the point of impact was very good and, IMO, fell into the "Get 'er Done" category. Full pass through the 3/4" yellow pine backing with a big cloud of dust from the berm behind.

We had the Mossberg 535 that I had bought out of a pawnshop in Texas. Tested it out with some birdshot, switched to some rifled slugs, and all seemed fine.
Switched to the rifled barrel and 2 3/4" sabots and ran 3 boxes through. Again, all seemed fine.
My buddy had given me a shotgun shell belt holder full of Winchester Super X 2 3/4" slugs, so I figured I'd give them a whirl. I'm not sure how old these OLD shells were, but by the appearance of the brass casings, they weren't spring chickens, so if we were going to full test the 535, let's see what it would do with probably-not-top-notch shells.
Fired 3 tubes worth of the Super X's, and I called it quits. The 535 ate 'em up, no problem, but it was like I was firing a black powder muzzle loader. Smoke city !
I told my son that we'd keep the rest of the Super X's for last ditch effort level. Inspecting the receiver/breech was interesting: dirty as heck.
To give the 535 one last test, I swapped back to the rifled barrel, dug into the ammo box, and pulled out two Brenneke 3" Magnum Crush shells. 666 grains.
I told my son I'd fire the first shell, see how it went, then if he wanted to, he could fire the second shell.
I fired the 1st Brenneke using the lead sled, and was glad I did. A LOT of recoil, as expected, but the 535 checked out okay.
My son had developed a nice rhythm to firing the 2 3/4" shells: good stance, hug firm (but not to the point of choking) and rock straight back SLIGHTLY with the recoil. I warned of the much greater recoil, but he wanted to try it freestanding. He did, and managed to hit the 50 yard target level and about 4" right.
He said with a grin, "Well, that was a mistake". : ' ) He had used great form, though, and they don't call it "Magnum Crush" for nothing. The berm dust is probably still settling. : ' )

I got a little side-tracked there (as usual) but the nice thing about the rubber adapter is that it goes in, with some effort, and can be removed with some effort.
Not a lot of effort, where you start cussing but enough that it gives you confidence that it isn't going to come loose easily.